Bob Dylan: The truth about the reclusive music legend

He's a notorious recluse who can’t stay off the stage and a renowned womaniser who appears to thrive on family life.

He's a notorious recluse who can’t stay off the stage and a renowned womaniser who appears to thrive on family life.

He is also one of the most influential songwriters who ever lived – yet he says he’s “not exactly obsessed with writing songs”.

Now, at 67, this bundle of willful contradictions is also the oldest musician to have a No 1 album in the UK.

Together Through Life, released last week, is Bob Dylan’s first album to top the chart since New Morning in November 1970.

With almost half a century of recording behind him, the enigmatic Dylan still provokes intrigue. Here are just some of the quirks behind the legend…

1: On tour, Dylan shuns luxury hotel suites in favour of budget accommodation such as Travelodges. His entourage are said to strip the beds of all linen in the morning, in case Bob’s dirty sheets appear on eBay for sale.

2: Arriving for a show in Belfast in 1991 he ignored the car sent by the promoter and waited at a bus stop instead. His arrival was captured by the local evening news.

3: His love of women is legendary. Dylan’s long list of exes include singer Joan Baez and actresses Raquel Welch, Sally Kirkland and Edie Sedgwick. Sedgwick was heartbroken after hearing Dylan had married Sara Lownds in secret. “I’m just not the kind of person who seems to be able to settle down,” Dylan once said.

4: Dylan married Lownds in November 1965 in front of just two witnesses. Desperately private, he was known to outright deny being married. Dylan and Lownds were rarely photographed together and one story has it that he bundled her into a walk-in wardrobe backstage in Vancouver after hearing two radio announcers were nearby. He would later marry his back-up singer Carol Dennis in 1986. The marriage was kept secret until 2001, nine years after they divorced.

5: In the 90s when he spoke to fellow songwriter Marshall Crenshaw about joining his band, he advised him to eat chili peppers every day.

6: He’s not one for locking himself away in his hotel room while touring. Dylan went through a period of cycling around the towns he was playing. He also lives to tour. In what has come to be known as the Neverending Tour, Dylan has played around 100 gigs every year since 1988. “A lot of people can’t stand touring,” he once said, “but to me it’s like breathing. I do it because I’m driven to do it.”

7: In 2000 head honchos from Sony Records had been promised a meet-and-greet with Dylan. It kept getting cancelled until the last night of the UK tour at Wembley when he was found in the car park lying under a tour van with his head on a pillow. When reminded he had the meet-and-greet he replied simply: “Yeah. Why do you think I’m lying here?”

8: Paul McCartney was approached at Heathrow Airport in the early 90s by a scrawny old man in an anorak, hood pulled up over his head. “He was really like a kind of bagman,” recalled McCartney later. It was several seconds before he realised that the bagman was, in fact, Bob Dylan.

9: During the 70s and 80s, Dylan’s mastiff hounds travelled with him everywhere. Obviously the tour motels had to be

dog-friendly.

10: Dylan rarely talks on stage, and when he does it often bemuses his listeners. He told an audience at Wembley in 2000: “It sure is a honour to play here… we remember Britain… the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill and all that. We knew Britain stood alone.”

People laughed but this was the memory of a three-year-old Jewish boy listening to reports of the war on the radio in 1944.

11: He once said that there should be statues to the Beatles in the US because “they helped this country remember itself”. Over the years he has performed onstage tributes to Joe Strummer, The Faces and his old friend George Harrison.

12: A few years ago when his tour reached Liverpool, a then-single Dylan spotted a pretty catering assistant and started

chatting her up. When he was called to go on stage he responded: “You can go on stage if you want. I’m talking to this young lady for a little longer…”

13: Dylan recently wandered into the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum in Hannibal, Missouri, unannounced and alone.

The curator spotted him and asked if he was really “him”. Dylan laughed and said: “I guess I am,” before disappearing. “Being noticed can be a burden,” Dylan has said. “Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.”

14:Three years ago he bought a 10-bedroom mansion in 25 acres of land in Speyside in the Highlands. Two years earlier he was made an honorary doctor of music by St Andrews University, only the second degree he has accepted.

15: He is always non-committal about where he calls home. But his main residence is probably his mansion in Malibu, California. In March neighbours complained that a terrible stench from an employee’s portable toilet on the estate was polluting their air.

16: One rumour says he has as many as 10 children. As officially as it’s possible to get with Dylan, he has five biological children and one step-daughter. He has nine grandchildren and dotes on them all.

17: Son Jakob Dylan, 39, is also a songwriter and is lead singer with rock band The Wallflowers. He is married to childhood sweetheart, Nicole Paige Denny, known as Paige Dylan and the couple have four sons. Jakob also has a successful solo career.

Another son Jesse, 43, is a film, TV and music video director. Jesse has directed music videos for Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Tom Petty, Lenny Kravitz, Nelly Furtado and Eels.

18: Dylan has sold 100 million records worldwide and is worth around £200m – more than Mick Jagger or Elton John.

19: His backing bands are kept on their toes as he constantly changes tempo, key and setlist. Everyone knows to prepare for the unexpected. Dylan is as unpredictable as he is gifted.

20: One of Dylan’s numerous love affairs was, bizarrely, with a woman who had joined the tour to teach him to walk the tightrope.